13 ms·

Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat

261 points by gregdoesit 5y ago

dvh 5y ago
>Two weeks before my starting date, my manager emails me to ask if there's any way I can do Android. I've solo made and published over 15 Android apps but I went full Dunning-Kruger and now I think I know nothing about Android development. It is too complex. If manager asks me, I don't know Android. I can't imagine Android development can be known. If you ask someone if they know Android development and they say yes, be skeptical.
- zibzab 5y ago
  To be fair, this was in 2016 :)
psing 5y ago
My takeaway -- even the highest regarded engineering orgs are still shitshows behind the scenes.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  In my personal experience, the more the org gives off the impression that it is hot shit, the worse it usually is.
  - lumost 5y ago
    The more the org values external appearance, the more the org justifies projects based on external appearances.
  - twic 5y ago
    Sometimes i think about trying to get a job at Netflix just so i can find out what it's really like.
    - ryanianian 5y ago
      I had 6+ years at a FAANG. It was awful. I would never go back. I happily took a 20% pay cut to go elsewhere. This said, I learned a lot (both good and bad) and it has been a good reference point for my career. So I recommend all engineers to strongly consider a FAANG while they're young and can tolerate a bit of burnout. Learn how the big companies do it, pay attention to what's good and what's bad, and keep that perspective with you in your career. But be honest with yourself ahead of time about what would make you leave and follow through with that. "Golden handcuffs" of high pay is a real thing.
      - notyourwork 5y ago
        Not all teams in FAANGs result in burn out or require careful through about joining. I've been at one of them for 6 years and still find my work life balance to be sane. In fact I enjoy what I'm doing quite a bit because of the business space I'm working in and the quality of peers.
        silicon2401 5y ago
        what do you consider sane work life balance? I consider anything over 40h excessive
        notyourwork 5y ago
        Yes. Aside from on-call week when I carry a pager 24-7 for the week but I don't work outside business hours unless paged.
        silicon2401 5y ago
        Yes what? I asked "what do you consider sane work hours?" lol.
        notyourwork 5y ago
        Because it was obvious, we know what full time is defined as. Anything more than 40h is more than a full time job.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    It took me a second to correctly analyze the sentiment of “hot shit.” I realized it means “really good,” as opposed to, for example, “steaming pile of shit” which means the opposite.
    - fration 5y ago
      It also generally has the connotation of someone having an inflated opinion of themselves.
    - ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
      You'll enjoy this exploration on this precise topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifNEgwGACEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifNEgwGACEQ
      - samuli 5y ago
        Here's a link to the original video from the actual standup comedian in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
    - robocat 5y ago
      The expression “shit hot” is a superlatively good thing. I don’t ever recall hearing “hot shit”, although perhaps it is a US term or a modern usage. Urban dictionary defines both.
      - lamontcg 5y ago
        "Hot shit" is a US term, and it is old and was around in the 80s at least.
        reaperducer 5y ago
        Longer than that. I saw it in a book from the 1950's. I expect it's a variation of "hot stuff" which I've heard in songs from the 1930's.
    - deleted 5y ago
  - cghendrix 5y ago
    What about Netflix?
  - screye 5y ago
    Yep, In my experience : Very high standards = Slow shipping = Boring You can bet that working on the Google Ads teams is far more 'boring' than Stadia or Glasses. Similarly, at my FANGAM company, the most boring teams are also the most stable.
    - toast0 5y ago
      > Very high standards = Slow shipping = Boring I don't think this is quite right. Slow shipping is tied to coordination more than standards (although if the standards are enforced by testing from another team, there's your coordination). If the standards are self enforced, you can still ship frequently, but maybe not a lot of big releases. Small teams and decoupled work where possible helps. I can only quibble about boring though. The code changes may not be exciting, but the environment can be. Some external event that spikes traffic can test your high standards, and may need remediations (in which case, I hope you can ship fast). Of course, boring is actually nice.
- cobaltoxide 5y ago
  Are you referring to Uber as "highest regarded engineering org"? :grimmace:
- sdljfjafsd 5y ago
  IMO, I would not put Uber engineering in the "highly regarded" bucket.
- protonimitate 5y ago
  I've personally never thought of Uber engineering as the pinnacle of contemporary engineering teams, is that a common sentiment for others? I know they're popular, but I thought it was mostly due to the pay scale / name recognition, not technical quality.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  Uber's engineering isn't well regarded. They have a reputation for over-engineering everything and having a misogynistic, cowboy culture.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I've heard about this rewrite multiple times now from different perspectives, both public and private. It's interesting how much the narrative changes based on the context of how it's being told. This author seems genuine and honest, but it's also clear that the story is being spun in the most positive way possible. The previous thread here has a different perspective on the situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462
- jonas21 5y ago
  If you read to the bottom of the Twitter thread, it's pretty consistent with what we're hearing here. It sounds like they're both saying there were lots of near-disasters, but these were overcome, and the app successfully shipped - however at the cost of burnout in the team. I wouldn't say either is putting a more positive or negative spin on it than the other.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  Is it really a different perspective? This author is trying to do their best to give it a positive spin but the article is still a description of an unforced disaster that miraculously worked out for Uber.
influx 5y ago
I worked at Uber and this whole shit show was typical and unnecessary. From the time, one of the things that TK was so proud of was the logo redesign and the design of one of the floors in the SF HQ that had a bunch of scifi elements. What was the benefit customers got out of any of this?
- notyourwork 5y ago
  Not everything has to benefit customers to stroke a founders ego.
  - deegles 5y ago
    Or to get engineers promotions.
    - notyourwork 5y ago
      POA: Promotion oriented architecture is a frustrating form of castle building.
- golergka 5y ago
  Theoretically, in a different company, great office design would make employees happy and more productive, for example. But I'm yet to see a better office design than a remote-first company.
- askafriend 5y ago
  Building the company is just as important as building the product. The company is more than the product.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    I hope this is sarcastic because if not I'm going to frame this very characteristic Hacker News comment.
    - 5y ago
tstrimple 5y ago
I wonder what the effective hourly rate was that these developers were paid for all of this work.
xiphias2 5y ago
I have no problem with leaders encouraging overworking, but the article could have detailed the compensation that people got during the work. My guess is that they were getting not much more hourly wage than a McDonald's worker for correcting for the bad leadership.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > My guess is that they were getting not much more hourly wage than a McDonald's worker for correcting for the bad leadership. I agree that this crunch time seems unnecessary, but it's mathematically impossible for Uber engineers to work enough to reduce their wages to anything near fast food wages. Even someone working 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks per year at $15/hour would earn $62K. That's less than half the starting salary for entry level engineers at Uber. Entry-level compensation at Uber is around $160K, with senior software engineers earning $400K or more: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engine...
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >80-hour weeks, 52 weeks per year at $15/hour would earn $62K Someone not salaried would be eligible for overtime and double time if working 7day weeks. That would significantly change the amount earned at $15/hour
    - plorkyeran 5y ago
      Doubling the wage for the 40 hours of overtime still doesn't get you to $100k, and the people working on this were all making much more than that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gregdoesit 5y ago
  OP here. We did not get any additional compensation for the long hours beyond you could expense food at late hours and on weekends. And at the end of the project, my director told everyone to take their SO to the most expensive restaurant, hire a babysitter if they have kids and expense the whole thing. I submitted a bill of €300. When I joined Uber, my compensation effectively doubled from my last - already pretty well-paying gig - so even if calculating the per-hour wages for those 3 months, I made good money, and nothing comparable to the hospitality industry.
Syntaf 5y ago
Props to the author for a great read! Just recently I had to pull a couple 12 hour days resolving a critical issue for an enterprise customer; I'd never been so ready to hang up my keyboard and move into a cabin in the woods afterwards. I can't imagine extending that crunch for _months_.
nosefrog 5y ago
I have a lot of friends who worked at Uber around 2015. I didn't accept an Uber offer because they were all insanely burned out.
cancan 5y ago
i worked on the backend for this rewrite, and it was even more extreme than the other write-ups suggest. we not only rewrote the apps, we also 1. moved from email-based auth to phone-based auth 2. removed all the auth and onboarding logic from the clients and moved it over to server 3. changed the networking from a hacky OpenAPI/Swagger code to Thrift over HTTP i am not saying it was the most conservative call to do all this at once but it was necessary. the auth logic was basically untenable and no one really knew how it worked. some team in amsterdam could (and did) lock down uber for android users in russia because they changed some code. we also had to move to phone as a primary identifier, because honestly there are many countries people dont even use email. but how do you deal with phone numbers that were validated more than 7+ months ago, if you want to avoid things like this? [1] or how do you deal with promotions that required validating phone numbers not being VoIP that you could do out-of-band before but now have to do in-band? anyway, i am being scatter minded here but it was probably one of the riskiest things uber did, from my point of view, changing the top of the funnel + also moving users from one auth to another with a download, esp given with apple's rollout mechanism we had no way back. but it all worked! i should probably write this up one day. 1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/when-phone-verification-and-recycled-numbers-collide-lyft-leaks-user-data/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/when-...
- cghendrix 5y ago
  Can you expand upon the team in Amsterdam locking down Uber for people in Russia?
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    Uber is in many markets, but has to serve them all from a single distribution. That leads to logic, screens, and workflows specific to each customers situation. I imagine it isn't difficult for one team to inadvertently affect another, given this constraint.
  - cancan 5y ago
    i am being sorta vague here and taking some creative liberties with the markets involved. but at a high level, there was so much logic spread over various versions of the apps + geographies + some permutations of those. so you could add a check somewhere (app/server/both) like if (foo) and assume it'd not break in some markets, but lo-and-behold, if often did.
gumby 5y ago
That was the year I sold my cars and switched to bike+rideshare. Even though my cc gave me an Uber benefit the new app experience was so flakey that I dumped uber for over a year, until I traveled to a place with poor Lyft service and found that the uber app was usable again. I’ve never seen why the app needed rewriting.
- Guest42 5y ago
  From a cost/opportunity cost standpoint, it’s an enormous decision. I wonder what those numbers look like. In general though I’m pretty biased towards boring things that work correctly as long as possible.
splatzone 5y ago
Why is it legal for businesses in the US to ask employees to work around the clock like this? It seems like an insane and unethical practice
- raspasov 5y ago
  At-will employment. If you don't like, go do something else.
  - JI00912 5y ago
    > If you don't like, go do something else. Many people don't have many options and companies abuse the shit out of that because people don't want to be homeless, get kicked out of the country or dead when they can't pay medical bills. Etc. Thus the need for legislation. And the lack of such legislation partially explains fabulous areas like skid row.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Skid Row would be better if employers were prevented from having their highly paid salaried employees from doing crunch time?
      - JI00912 5y ago
        You're pretending to misunderstand and you know it.
        oh_sigh 5y ago
        I'm actually not. I have no idea what the connection between Skid Row and this type of employment law would be.
  - volkk 5y ago
    that doesn't explain the _why_, that only explains the how this keeps persisting
- 5y ago
j4yav 5y ago
Wow, what a nightmare! I remember a project or two like that in my career that I wish I could go advise my younger self to avoid. I have been around long enough to remember when people bore this sort or abuse as a mark of pride almost, like the scars made them who they are despite seeing peers burning out, becoming sick, quitting, or getting divorces as a result of overwork.
- the_local_host 5y ago
  I'm surprised that "moral hazard" is rarely mentioned in these types of stories. By making their overtime effort available to the CEO as insurance against bad decisions, the engineers are in a way encouraging more bad decisions, since it's the engineers bearing the costs.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Until the entire team quits at the same time which has happened to many companies that do this stuff. However, if this update failed nothing significant would have happened to Uber. So, they might not have actually cared.
jonplackett 5y ago
> Tooling is a major issue: compiling the app from scratch takes 25-30 minutes on iOS and around 10 on Android As a relatively naive to massive apps iPhone developer (I’ve made apps with millions of downloads, but nothing on Ubers scale) I find it confusing how a relatively straight forward iPhone app like Uber can be so complex. It’s basically a map and 3 buttons? And an ‘in the car’ state. They weren’t doing pool or bill splitting at this point I don’t think. I’d have thought everything else is back-end complexity? Can someone do an explain like I’m 5 on this?
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Here‘s a pretty comprehensive video about it: https://youtu.be/zmeCYiD0hnE https://youtu.be/zmeCYiD0hnE TL;DW (IIRC): Uber is in a ton of markets and each one has significant differences, for example in payment providers - the app needs to support all of them and each comes with its own SDK.
- aidos 5y ago
  From memory, when this came up before there was a lot more information about how they have to jam in a load of stuff to deal with international travel so that everything works as soon as you arrive in another country.
- lhorie 5y ago
  This exact question was answered before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    Even reading all of that I am still surprised to find that the Uber Rider app is a over 1M LOC per platform. 20% of the functionality used by most users takes how many lines? It seems that they’re chasing the long tail of covering every global trip-taking use case. It might be fun to build, but how many of those features have a positive ROI?
    - 5y ago
superasn 5y ago
This whole blog post reads like The phoenix project book. I actually chuckled at the part where the legal got involved for the client-side fix like it so used to happen in the book.
dudul 5y ago
I'm surprised to read that most people left after the nightmare instead of during. I would have taken this shit for a week, maybe 2, but past that, I'm out of here. If you're gonna stick around during the whole thing to see it through, why leave once it's over?
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  A lot of people want to stick around to complete a project as it looks good on your CV. Particularly at a junior level. From my experience (in games) it’s also quite intoxicating at the time and you get quite emotionally invested in supporting the team and fixing issues. In particular crunch is partly enabled because you get close through the adversity. You usually don’t get much opportunity to take stock until afterwards being so caught up in the moment. It’s pretty common to get a rash of departures right after it all calms down.
- silexia 5y ago
  They didn't have a choice. Imagine their reference check for future jobs where Uber HR tells the new potential employer "X left during the start of crunch time for our new app". You have to suffer through, then leave.
  - dudul 5y ago
    Fair enough, but honestly, I would probably just be open about why I left Uber. I would want to make sure I would not end up in the same kind of toxic environment.
  - psyc 5y ago
    HR is not going to snipe an ex-employee in solidarity with the new employer. As a rule, they only confirm the person worked there when they said they did.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > As a rule Rules are there to be broken, and even those mandated by law will get broken (see for example the non-compete cartel drama from a couple years back).
calcsam 5y ago
Here's a Twitter thread about the same story, that dives a bit more into the internal politics -- https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845 https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845
- robocat 5y ago
  I like this quote: “A bunch of folks burned out along the way. A ton of money was spent, hard lessons were learned, but still to this day most people insist the rewrite was all worth it. New engineers who joined up loved the architectural consistency and never knew the pain it took to get there.”
jgalt212 5y ago
Celebrity board members in a nutshell. > Ariana Huffington joins Uber's board around the same time and releases her book on the importance of sleep right around this time, and piles of free copies are available in the office. Yes, sleep is important. So why am I at the office past midnight?
Farbklex 5y ago
Highly focused development crunch time is "refreshing" from time to time. And since the involved engineers probably got pretty good salaries, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone. But as I always say: Don't let a management problem become an engineering problem. The deadline was artificial and put stress on everyone. Uber is not an agency which has to deliver a product to some client. They have the freedom to release apps "when they're done" but choose not to do so.
- sg47 5y ago
  While it's not an agency, Uber has to allocate resources for a finite amount of time for a particular task. If there are other projects predicated on this app rewrite, it's absolutely essential that the rewrite is completed by a certain date.
  - awillen 5y ago
    The only things predicated on the app release are marketing, etc. that they've decided to predicate on it. They also chose to take the launch on in the first place. Sometimes there are external deadlines (events whose schedule you don't control, things for partners, etc.), but this just clearly isn't one of them. They could've released the update after Christmas - that was 100% under their control.
- yashap 5y ago
  Indeed. Sounds like TK was a major issue here, but so were the whole tree of managers under him that agreed to ridiculous timelines that would destroy their teams instead of just pushing back on the deadline. Then again ... wouldn’t surprise me if TK very intentionally built such a management team. Regardless, to be safe, I’ll definitely never work at Uber, or any other company TK has touched. This sounds like an absolute nightmare, and is so different from my experiences in ~a decade at other tech companies that it’s crazy.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    The crazy thing is... his bold, risk-takey leadership worked. So who's to blame these executives for continuing to pull these kinds of stunts? Sure a bunch of people burn out and leave but does that actually move the needle on any metrics besides turnover that these people look at? Assuming that departures get filled I don't know that turnover has that much of an impact on other metrics.
trevor-e 5y ago
If I'm reading this correctly, the whole fiasco started because the CEO decided they _have_ to release a new version of the app by some arbitrary date? And to meet this arbitrary deadline, the engineers had to roll out a ton of new features all at the same time inevitably causing a ton of fires/bugs/outages for the end users? Sounds like a nightmare and I'd be super pissed as an engineer having to support this mess. Is there more background on why Helix had to be released so aggressively?
- Tomte 5y ago
  At my former employer deadlines were often not even ostensibly about some rational scheduling or roadmap, but simply "the birthday of the long-deceased husband who made the company big and successful".
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Slightly better than random tho right? Cause you can plan around predictable things.
- jccooper 5y ago
  I've done the deadline-via-management-boast thing, and it's highly corrosive. Burnout's especially bad when you look back when it's all done and ask "why?" and there's no answer.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  What I don't understand is why they did a complete rewrite. If the CEO wants a "new app", you get to work doing a redesign of the UX and a refactor of the code base. You usually end up with a better product and better code, and it gives you the flexibility of not being all or nothing.
  - Slartie 5y ago
    Some codebases have just mutated into junk beyond the point at which refactoring could still rescue any value, so a full rewrite actually becomes the better option. I would assume this problem to be especially widespread in apps of hastily growing startups.
staplung 5y ago
Burnout was an obvious cost to this mess. A less obvious cost must surely have been all the people that read about it and decided to never work for Uber. But then it's always been easy to ignore the costs that can't be measured.
raylad 5y ago
Another example of out-of-touch upper management dictating an unrealistic development schedule for no particular good reason (according to the article), and making everyone's life hell for months.
DevKoala 5y ago
> Ariana Huffington joins Uber's board around the same time and releases her book on the importance of sleep right around this time, and piles of free copies are available in the office. Yes, sleep is important. So why am I at the office past midnight? Right: the deadline that can not be moved. This feels too familiar. “You have unlimited vacation, just take a week off, but we are not moving that deadline.”
- anotherv 5y ago
  You have free lunch, catering onsite chef or order from practically any takeaway. Right: just don't think you're getting a lunch for anything other than eating
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It just goes in the long list of things companies say but clearly don't mean. "Make sure you do the mandatory training called Safety First. On an unrelated note, we're pulling back on remote working and you're expected to be at your desk 3 days a week. Don't forget to wear your mask at all times."
- junon 5y ago
  I was at Uber during this time. Her book was stacked on tables all around the main headquarters offices, free to take. Took a looooong time for them to disappear and I'm still not convinced more than a handful of people cared. People didn't really like her internally. She was good friends with Travis apparently and that's about as far as the relationship to the company seemed to go. There was once a time where employees could request a ride with her directly from the app but to be honest the prospect sounded horrifying.
  - jogjayr 5y ago
    > There was once a time where employees could request a ride with her directly from the app You'd share an Uber with her? Or would she be driving the Uber? Sounds fascinating either way.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
harshaw 5y ago
There are truly great things that can be accomplished in life with crunch time. I'd consider good examples as the early days of SpaceX or some other game changing endeavor. A rewrite of a mobile app doesn't seem to fit the bill. I'm also reminded of the time that during an Uber ride the app took me into this secret screen where it attempted to get me to do some kind of coding assessment for recruiting. The engineering on this feature was absolutely nuts. But also completely over the top and laughably irrelevant for me and my geographic location.
callesgg 5y ago
A hundred engineers to rebuild the Uber app.... That is insane! To me it seams like something that could be done with 2-3 guys over 6 months with room to spare. But yeah I get it they have the money and everyone wants to work with their friends.
sdljfjafsd 5y ago
my question is, what was the business value of doing a full write rather than incremental shift? same question on the specific date - was their any business value delivered by specifically launching the new app on New Year's? If not, this rewrite basically cost huge amounts of burnout across the mobile and server teams for no business value. At best it seems like an intense learning experience that didn't actually unlock $$.
coldcode 5y ago
My team and I were often the target for insane rewrite requests like this; I know this type of ridiculousness only too well. Sure you can succeed even under the most insane circumstances but that cost is not worth it for the people who are forced to do the impossible; in the end the people who suffered are mostly ignored while the top execs revel in the end result as if it was them personally doing it. I finally said enough of this madness and retired this year. No matter how many times you manage to pull off miracles the people demanding them don't give a shit about you or your team.
- sciprojguy 5y ago
  This. If you're willing to routinely go "above and beyond" your normal work hours, then in management's mind that "above and beyond" will become your normal work hours and it will factor into their planning.
tester756 5y ago
>The pace of work is still excruciatingly slow. Tooling is a major issue: compiling the app from scratch takes 25-30 minutes on iOS and around 10 on Android. what the fuck? HaLf HoUr To CoMpIlE aPp?
sneak 5y ago
> I have no idea how, but two and a half-hours later, the fix is live. I'm assuming the release team used all the goodwill accumulated over the years to make the fastest app update I've ever heard of happen. Either way, it's done, and done fast. Let's just hope it works. It's sort of amazing how we as an industry have all just adapted to the App Store industrywide censorship and gatekeeping. It's astounding that Apple has been able to pull this off, and even more astounding that so many companies are willing to work as sharecroppers for them. Find it on the Apple App Store under AOL keyword Uber!
yboris 5y ago
I'm curious, what would have been the repercussions of an engineer saying "I'm comfortable with at most 40 hours of work per week". Would they have been fired? Also, were the people working longer hours getting paid overtime?
phtrivier 5y ago
I love the author's writing in general, and it obvious that he learned the lesson from this experience. What's insane is that their management has not learned that lesson, from, say, the last 30years of people writing about software project management. I guess it will take such a caricatural death march to kill a unicorn before people get a clue. (And even that would be surprising. Not the killing - the getting a clue. ) Still, that's almost as great an advertisement for _not_ working at Uber as, say... everything else coming out of Uber.
didibus 5y ago
I kinda hate this engineer, he didn't push hard enough, he let the professional bar be crossed, there was seemingly no business value in the whole project either. It would be refreshing if the devs just didn't take this, those that quit after should have quit during the project instead. I think there's a saying that goes: "you get what you're willing to tolerate". This is often the reason why employees get screwed over, they're willing to tolerate far too much, for far too little reasons. Covering up bad management and planning is not something engineers should tolerate. You should say, no sorry, you missed the deadline to fund us and have engineering start early enough, that's that, you screwed up your planning, you failed at being a good manager. We're not going to cover for your screw up. Edit: Specifically, I don't personally hate them, but I hate that it played out this way, and I know it's a difficult position to be in and it's difficult to get out of, it just makes me mad, and I don't know what solutions there are.. maybe to fight to change the norm back to hourly employment, or have contracts with a per-week maximum hour cap that if breached warrants bonus pay on top of salaried employment.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  Not everyone wants to martyr themself to save management from hoisting themselves on their own petards. Especially when it's just a taxi app.
- qwertywert_ 5y ago
  Well they are getting paid like 500k no?
  - animal531 5y ago
    No, that's how you get exploited. You get paid 100% of your salary for 100% of your agreed upon time. If you're then expected to work 200% of the time then you should be paid 200%, with the ability to say no if you don't want to. The actual amount is irrelevant.
    - seem_2211 5y ago
      This is a deluded way of thinking the world works. Is it how things should be? Probably. But this is nothing close to reality.
jeffrallen 5y ago
Shit like this is why Uber should have failed. Total disregard for humans. TK is a monster.
subsaharancoder 5y ago
"The art of the rewrite" by Uber Leadership could be an interesting book. In 2019 When AB5 was passed another rewrite was done in order to make the case that drivers were not employees but independent contractors and teams were assembled into one "zone" working like crazy to make some major changes for one market (the fear was that AB5 would be the start and all other states would follow with similar laws). The funny thing is during multiple meetings people would ask if Lyft was doing anything as radical as Uber and AFAIK the answer was no. FFWD to 2021 and with the passage of Prop 22 most if not all of the features implemented as part of the rewrite including DSTOP (Drivers Set Their Own Price), Price range instead of Fixed price etc are being stripped out.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> And as per Apple's restrictions, if your bundle size is over 100MB, users cannot download the app over the air I wish stores implemented more such hard limits, or other strong incentives to reduce space usage. I bet Uber could make its app significantly smaller than 234 MB (Google Maps: 137 MB, Chrome: 36 MB), but that would require effort, and it's cheaper to consume an extra 100 MB on 100 million other people's phones than to put in that effort.
- bhupy 5y ago
  Just curious…why? For the vast majority of Uber’s users, space is basically free.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    Because I can store either Uber's (and 10 other companies') bloat, or an extra 10 album's worth of music. I'd rather have the music.
    - bhupy 5y ago
      Well, in practice, it's not either-or, the vast majority of users get to have both 10+ companies "bloat", as well as 10 album's worth of music. The base model of an Apple iPhone comes with 64GB, which is probably more than enough for the vast majority of Apple users — all the bloaty apps one might use on a day to day basis, all their pictures, and all their music. For an extra $50 you get 128GB. This is more than enough for the vast vast majority of Apple users (yes I'm aware that there probably exists dozens of idiosyncratic power users who might need even more). In fact, if you're the kind of user that's going to blow past that, it's probably because you're storing more-than-average 4K or 8K video and RAW images, where shaving down app size is probably not going to help anyway.
- dbbk 5y ago
  If you'd read the article you would learn the many reasons why the app blew past the bundle size limit. None of which particularly being their fault.
hypebeast123 5y ago
>Ariana Huffington joins Uber's board around the same time and releases her book on the importance of sleep right around this time, and piles of free copies are available in the office So basically, work 80 hours a week and have Ariana Huffington shill her useless book to you? Uber sounds like a shithole if you ask me. Those people that quit made the right choice

261 points by gregdoesit 5y ago

dvh 5y ago

>Two weeks before my starting date, my manager emails me to ask if there's any way I can do Android. I've solo made and published over 15 Android apps but I went full Dunning-Kruger and now I think I know nothing about Android development. It is too complex. If manager asks me, I don't know Android. I can't imagine Android development can be known. If you ask someone if they know Android development and they say yes, be skeptical.

zibzab 5y ago
To be fair, this was in 2016 :)

psing 5y ago

My takeaway -- even the highest regarded engineering orgs are still shitshows behind the scenes.

whalesalad 5y ago
In my personal experience, the more the org gives off the impression that it is hot shit, the worse it usually is.
- lumost 5y ago
  The more the org values external appearance, the more the org justifies projects based on external appearances.
- twic 5y ago
  Sometimes i think about trying to get a job at Netflix just so i can find out what it's really like.
  - ryanianian 5y ago
    I had 6+ years at a FAANG. It was awful. I would never go back. I happily took a 20% pay cut to go elsewhere. This said, I learned a lot (both good and bad) and it has been a good reference point for my career. So I recommend all engineers to strongly consider a FAANG while they're young and can tolerate a bit of burnout. Learn how the big companies do it, pay attention to what's good and what's bad, and keep that perspective with you in your career. But be honest with yourself ahead of time about what would make you leave and follow through with that. "Golden handcuffs" of high pay is a real thing.
    - notyourwork 5y ago
      Not all teams in FAANGs result in burn out or require careful through about joining. I've been at one of them for 6 years and still find my work life balance to be sane. In fact I enjoy what I'm doing quite a bit because of the business space I'm working in and the quality of peers.
      - silicon2401 5y ago
        what do you consider sane work life balance? I consider anything over 40h excessive
        notyourwork 5y ago
        Yes. Aside from on-call week when I carry a pager 24-7 for the week but I don't work outside business hours unless paged.
        silicon2401 5y ago
        Yes what? I asked "what do you consider sane work hours?" lol.
        notyourwork 5y ago
        Because it was obvious, we know what full time is defined as. Anything more than 40h is more than a full time job.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  It took me a second to correctly analyze the sentiment of “hot shit.” I realized it means “really good,” as opposed to, for example, “steaming pile of shit” which means the opposite.
  - fration 5y ago
    It also generally has the connotation of someone having an inflated opinion of themselves.
  - ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
    You'll enjoy this exploration on this precise topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifNEgwGACEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifNEgwGACEQ
    - samuli 5y ago
      Here's a link to the original video from the actual standup comedian in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
  - robocat 5y ago
    The expression “shit hot” is a superlatively good thing. I don’t ever recall hearing “hot shit”, although perhaps it is a US term or a modern usage. Urban dictionary defines both.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      "Hot shit" is a US term, and it is old and was around in the 80s at least.
      - reaperducer 5y ago
        Longer than that. I saw it in a book from the 1950's. I expect it's a variation of "hot stuff" which I've heard in songs from the 1930's.
  - deleted 5y ago
- cghendrix 5y ago
  What about Netflix?
- screye 5y ago
  Yep, In my experience : Very high standards = Slow shipping = Boring You can bet that working on the Google Ads teams is far more 'boring' than Stadia or Glasses. Similarly, at my FANGAM company, the most boring teams are also the most stable.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > Very high standards = Slow shipping = Boring I don't think this is quite right. Slow shipping is tied to coordination more than standards (although if the standards are enforced by testing from another team, there's your coordination). If the standards are self enforced, you can still ship frequently, but maybe not a lot of big releases. Small teams and decoupled work where possible helps. I can only quibble about boring though. The code changes may not be exciting, but the environment can be. Some external event that spikes traffic can test your high standards, and may need remediations (in which case, I hope you can ship fast). Of course, boring is actually nice.
cobaltoxide 5y ago
Are you referring to Uber as "highest regarded engineering org"? :grimmace:
sdljfjafsd 5y ago
IMO, I would not put Uber engineering in the "highly regarded" bucket.
protonimitate 5y ago
I've personally never thought of Uber engineering as the pinnacle of contemporary engineering teams, is that a common sentiment for others? I know they're popular, but I thought it was mostly due to the pay scale / name recognition, not technical quality.
thesausageking 5y ago
Uber's engineering isn't well regarded. They have a reputation for over-engineering everything and having a misogynistic, cowboy culture.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I've heard about this rewrite multiple times now from different perspectives, both public and private. It's interesting how much the narrative changes based on the context of how it's being told. This author seems genuine and honest, but it's also clear that the story is being spun in the most positive way possible. The previous thread here has a different perspective on the situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462

jonas21 5y ago
If you read to the bottom of the Twitter thread, it's pretty consistent with what we're hearing here. It sounds like they're both saying there were lots of near-disasters, but these were overcome, and the app successfully shipped - however at the cost of burnout in the team. I wouldn't say either is putting a more positive or negative spin on it than the other.
plorkyeran 5y ago
Is it really a different perspective? This author is trying to do their best to give it a positive spin but the article is still a description of an unforced disaster that miraculously worked out for Uber.

influx 5y ago

I worked at Uber and this whole shit show was typical and unnecessary. From the time, one of the things that TK was so proud of was the logo redesign and the design of one of the floors in the SF HQ that had a bunch of scifi elements. What was the benefit customers got out of any of this?

notyourwork 5y ago
Not everything has to benefit customers to stroke a founders ego.
- deegles 5y ago
  Or to get engineers promotions.
  - notyourwork 5y ago
    POA: Promotion oriented architecture is a frustrating form of castle building.
golergka 5y ago
Theoretically, in a different company, great office design would make employees happy and more productive, for example. But I'm yet to see a better office design than a remote-first company.
askafriend 5y ago
Building the company is just as important as building the product. The company is more than the product.
- noobermin 5y ago
  I hope this is sarcastic because if not I'm going to frame this very characteristic Hacker News comment.
  - 5y ago

tstrimple 5y ago

I wonder what the effective hourly rate was that these developers were paid for all of this work.

xiphias2 5y ago

I have no problem with leaders encouraging overworking, but the article could have detailed the compensation that people got during the work. My guess is that they were getting not much more hourly wage than a McDonald's worker for correcting for the bad leadership.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> My guess is that they were getting not much more hourly wage than a McDonald's worker for correcting for the bad leadership. I agree that this crunch time seems unnecessary, but it's mathematically impossible for Uber engineers to work enough to reduce their wages to anything near fast food wages. Even someone working 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks per year at $15/hour would earn $62K. That's less than half the starting salary for entry level engineers at Uber. Entry-level compensation at Uber is around $160K, with senior software engineers earning $400K or more: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engine...
- dylan604 5y ago
  >80-hour weeks, 52 weeks per year at $15/hour would earn $62K Someone not salaried would be eligible for overtime and double time if working 7day weeks. That would significantly change the amount earned at $15/hour
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Doubling the wage for the 40 hours of overtime still doesn't get you to $100k, and the people working on this were all making much more than that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gregdoesit 5y ago
OP here. We did not get any additional compensation for the long hours beyond you could expense food at late hours and on weekends. And at the end of the project, my director told everyone to take their SO to the most expensive restaurant, hire a babysitter if they have kids and expense the whole thing. I submitted a bill of €300. When I joined Uber, my compensation effectively doubled from my last - already pretty well-paying gig - so even if calculating the per-hour wages for those 3 months, I made good money, and nothing comparable to the hospitality industry.

Syntaf 5y ago

Props to the author for a great read! Just recently I had to pull a couple 12 hour days resolving a critical issue for an enterprise customer; I'd never been so ready to hang up my keyboard and move into a cabin in the woods afterwards. I can't imagine extending that crunch for _months_.

nosefrog 5y ago

I have a lot of friends who worked at Uber around 2015. I didn't accept an Uber offer because they were all insanely burned out.

cancan 5y ago

i worked on the backend for this rewrite, and it was even more extreme than the other write-ups suggest. we not only rewrote the apps, we also 1. moved from email-based auth to phone-based auth 2. removed all the auth and onboarding logic from the clients and moved it over to server 3. changed the networking from a hacky OpenAPI/Swagger code to Thrift over HTTP i am not saying it was the most conservative call to do all this at once but it was necessary. the auth logic was basically untenable and no one really knew how it worked. some team in amsterdam could (and did) lock down uber for android users in russia because they changed some code. we also had to move to phone as a primary identifier, because honestly there are many countries people dont even use email. but how do you deal with phone numbers that were validated more than 7+ months ago, if you want to avoid things like this? [1] or how do you deal with promotions that required validating phone numbers not being VoIP that you could do out-of-band before but now have to do in-band? anyway, i am being scatter minded here but it was probably one of the riskiest things uber did, from my point of view, changing the top of the funnel + also moving users from one auth to another with a download, esp given with apple's rollout mechanism we had no way back. but it all worked! i should probably write this up one day. 1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/when-phone-verification-and-recycled-numbers-collide-lyft-leaks-user-data/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/when-...

cghendrix 5y ago
Can you expand upon the team in Amsterdam locking down Uber for people in Russia?
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  Uber is in many markets, but has to serve them all from a single distribution. That leads to logic, screens, and workflows specific to each customers situation. I imagine it isn't difficult for one team to inadvertently affect another, given this constraint.
- cancan 5y ago
  i am being sorta vague here and taking some creative liberties with the markets involved. but at a high level, there was so much logic spread over various versions of the apps + geographies + some permutations of those. so you could add a check somewhere (app/server/both) like if (foo) and assume it'd not break in some markets, but lo-and-behold, if often did.

gumby 5y ago

That was the year I sold my cars and switched to bike+rideshare. Even though my cc gave me an Uber benefit the new app experience was so flakey that I dumped uber for over a year, until I traveled to a place with poor Lyft service and found that the uber app was usable again. I’ve never seen why the app needed rewriting.

Guest42 5y ago
From a cost/opportunity cost standpoint, it’s an enormous decision. I wonder what those numbers look like. In general though I’m pretty biased towards boring things that work correctly as long as possible.

splatzone 5y ago

Why is it legal for businesses in the US to ask employees to work around the clock like this? It seems like an insane and unethical practice

raspasov 5y ago
At-will employment. If you don't like, go do something else.
- JI00912 5y ago
  > If you don't like, go do something else. Many people don't have many options and companies abuse the shit out of that because people don't want to be homeless, get kicked out of the country or dead when they can't pay medical bills. Etc. Thus the need for legislation. And the lack of such legislation partially explains fabulous areas like skid row.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Skid Row would be better if employers were prevented from having their highly paid salaried employees from doing crunch time?
    - JI00912 5y ago
      You're pretending to misunderstand and you know it.
      - oh_sigh 5y ago
        I'm actually not. I have no idea what the connection between Skid Row and this type of employment law would be.
- volkk 5y ago
  that doesn't explain the _why_, that only explains the how this keeps persisting
5y ago

j4yav 5y ago

Wow, what a nightmare! I remember a project or two like that in my career that I wish I could go advise my younger self to avoid. I have been around long enough to remember when people bore this sort or abuse as a mark of pride almost, like the scars made them who they are despite seeing peers burning out, becoming sick, quitting, or getting divorces as a result of overwork.

the_local_host 5y ago
I'm surprised that "moral hazard" is rarely mentioned in these types of stories. By making their overtime effort available to the CEO as insurance against bad decisions, the engineers are in a way encouraging more bad decisions, since it's the engineers bearing the costs.
- Retric 5y ago
  Until the entire team quits at the same time which has happened to many companies that do this stuff. However, if this update failed nothing significant would have happened to Uber. So, they might not have actually cared.

jonplackett 5y ago

> Tooling is a major issue: compiling the app from scratch takes 25-30 minutes on iOS and around 10 on Android As a relatively naive to massive apps iPhone developer (I’ve made apps with millions of downloads, but nothing on Ubers scale) I find it confusing how a relatively straight forward iPhone app like Uber can be so complex. It’s basically a map and 3 buttons? And an ‘in the car’ state. They weren’t doing pool or bill splitting at this point I don’t think. I’d have thought everything else is back-end complexity? Can someone do an explain like I’m 5 on this?

solarkraft 5y ago
Here‘s a pretty comprehensive video about it: https://youtu.be/zmeCYiD0hnE https://youtu.be/zmeCYiD0hnE TL;DW (IIRC): Uber is in a ton of markets and each one has significant differences, for example in payment providers - the app needs to support all of them and each comes with its own SDK.
aidos 5y ago
From memory, when this came up before there was a lot more information about how they have to jam in a load of stuff to deal with international travel so that everything works as soon as you arrive in another country.
lhorie 5y ago
This exact question was answered before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Even reading all of that I am still surprised to find that the Uber Rider app is a over 1M LOC per platform. 20% of the functionality used by most users takes how many lines? It seems that they’re chasing the long tail of covering every global trip-taking use case. It might be fun to build, but how many of those features have a positive ROI?
  - 5y ago

superasn 5y ago

This whole blog post reads like The phoenix project book. I actually chuckled at the part where the legal got involved for the client-side fix like it so used to happen in the book.

dudul 5y ago

I'm surprised to read that most people left after the nightmare instead of during. I would have taken this shit for a week, maybe 2, but past that, I'm out of here. If you're gonna stick around during the whole thing to see it through, why leave once it's over?

meheleventyone 5y ago
A lot of people want to stick around to complete a project as it looks good on your CV. Particularly at a junior level. From my experience (in games) it’s also quite intoxicating at the time and you get quite emotionally invested in supporting the team and fixing issues. In particular crunch is partly enabled because you get close through the adversity. You usually don’t get much opportunity to take stock until afterwards being so caught up in the moment. It’s pretty common to get a rash of departures right after it all calms down.
silexia 5y ago
They didn't have a choice. Imagine their reference check for future jobs where Uber HR tells the new potential employer "X left during the start of crunch time for our new app". You have to suffer through, then leave.
- dudul 5y ago
  Fair enough, but honestly, I would probably just be open about why I left Uber. I would want to make sure I would not end up in the same kind of toxic environment.
- psyc 5y ago
  HR is not going to snipe an ex-employee in solidarity with the new employer. As a rule, they only confirm the person worked there when they said they did.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > As a rule Rules are there to be broken, and even those mandated by law will get broken (see for example the non-compete cartel drama from a couple years back).

calcsam 5y ago

Here's a Twitter thread about the same story, that dives a bit more into the internal politics -- https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845 https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845

robocat 5y ago
I like this quote: “A bunch of folks burned out along the way. A ton of money was spent, hard lessons were learned, but still to this day most people insist the rewrite was all worth it. New engineers who joined up loved the architectural consistency and never knew the pain it took to get there.”

jgalt212 5y ago

Celebrity board members in a nutshell. > Ariana Huffington joins Uber's board around the same time and releases her book on the importance of sleep right around this time, and piles of free copies are available in the office. Yes, sleep is important. So why am I at the office past midnight?

Farbklex 5y ago

Highly focused development crunch time is "refreshing" from time to time. And since the involved engineers probably got pretty good salaries, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone. But as I always say: Don't let a management problem become an engineering problem. The deadline was artificial and put stress on everyone. Uber is not an agency which has to deliver a product to some client. They have the freedom to release apps "when they're done" but choose not to do so.

sg47 5y ago
While it's not an agency, Uber has to allocate resources for a finite amount of time for a particular task. If there are other projects predicated on this app rewrite, it's absolutely essential that the rewrite is completed by a certain date.
- awillen 5y ago
  The only things predicated on the app release are marketing, etc. that they've decided to predicate on it. They also chose to take the launch on in the first place. Sometimes there are external deadlines (events whose schedule you don't control, things for partners, etc.), but this just clearly isn't one of them. They could've released the update after Christmas - that was 100% under their control.
yashap 5y ago
Indeed. Sounds like TK was a major issue here, but so were the whole tree of managers under him that agreed to ridiculous timelines that would destroy their teams instead of just pushing back on the deadline. Then again ... wouldn’t surprise me if TK very intentionally built such a management team. Regardless, to be safe, I’ll definitely never work at Uber, or any other company TK has touched. This sounds like an absolute nightmare, and is so different from my experiences in ~a decade at other tech companies that it’s crazy.
- foobarian 5y ago
  The crazy thing is... his bold, risk-takey leadership worked. So who's to blame these executives for continuing to pull these kinds of stunts? Sure a bunch of people burn out and leave but does that actually move the needle on any metrics besides turnover that these people look at? Assuming that departures get filled I don't know that turnover has that much of an impact on other metrics.

trevor-e 5y ago

If I'm reading this correctly, the whole fiasco started because the CEO decided they _have_ to release a new version of the app by some arbitrary date? And to meet this arbitrary deadline, the engineers had to roll out a ton of new features all at the same time inevitably causing a ton of fires/bugs/outages for the end users? Sounds like a nightmare and I'd be super pissed as an engineer having to support this mess. Is there more background on why Helix had to be released so aggressively?

Tomte 5y ago
At my former employer deadlines were often not even ostensibly about some rational scheduling or roadmap, but simply "the birthday of the long-deceased husband who made the company big and successful".
- edoceo 5y ago
  Slightly better than random tho right? Cause you can plan around predictable things.
jccooper 5y ago
I've done the deadline-via-management-boast thing, and it's highly corrosive. Burnout's especially bad when you look back when it's all done and ask "why?" and there's no answer.
thesausageking 5y ago
What I don't understand is why they did a complete rewrite. If the CEO wants a "new app", you get to work doing a redesign of the UX and a refactor of the code base. You usually end up with a better product and better code, and it gives you the flexibility of not being all or nothing.
- Slartie 5y ago
  Some codebases have just mutated into junk beyond the point at which refactoring could still rescue any value, so a full rewrite actually becomes the better option. I would assume this problem to be especially widespread in apps of hastily growing startups.

staplung 5y ago

Burnout was an obvious cost to this mess. A less obvious cost must surely have been all the people that read about it and decided to never work for Uber. But then it's always been easy to ignore the costs that can't be measured.

raylad 5y ago

Another example of out-of-touch upper management dictating an unrealistic development schedule for no particular good reason (according to the article), and making everyone's life hell for months.

DevKoala 5y ago

> Ariana Huffington joins Uber's board around the same time and releases her book on the importance of sleep right around this time, and piles of free copies are available in the office. Yes, sleep is important. So why am I at the office past midnight? Right: the deadline that can not be moved. This feels too familiar. “You have unlimited vacation, just take a week off, but we are not moving that deadline.”

anotherv 5y ago
You have free lunch, catering onsite chef or order from practically any takeaway. Right: just don't think you're getting a lunch for anything other than eating
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It just goes in the long list of things companies say but clearly don't mean. "Make sure you do the mandatory training called Safety First. On an unrelated note, we're pulling back on remote working and you're expected to be at your desk 3 days a week. Don't forget to wear your mask at all times."
junon 5y ago
I was at Uber during this time. Her book was stacked on tables all around the main headquarters offices, free to take. Took a looooong time for them to disappear and I'm still not convinced more than a handful of people cared. People didn't really like her internally. She was good friends with Travis apparently and that's about as far as the relationship to the company seemed to go. There was once a time where employees could request a ride with her directly from the app but to be honest the prospect sounded horrifying.
- jogjayr 5y ago
  > There was once a time where employees could request a ride with her directly from the app You'd share an Uber with her? Or would she be driving the Uber? Sounds fascinating either way.
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

harshaw 5y ago

There are truly great things that can be accomplished in life with crunch time. I'd consider good examples as the early days of SpaceX or some other game changing endeavor. A rewrite of a mobile app doesn't seem to fit the bill. I'm also reminded of the time that during an Uber ride the app took me into this secret screen where it attempted to get me to do some kind of coding assessment for recruiting. The engineering on this feature was absolutely nuts. But also completely over the top and laughably irrelevant for me and my geographic location.

callesgg 5y ago

A hundred engineers to rebuild the Uber app.... That is insane! To me it seams like something that could be done with 2-3 guys over 6 months with room to spare. But yeah I get it they have the money and everyone wants to work with their friends.

sdljfjafsd 5y ago

my question is, what was the business value of doing a full write rather than incremental shift? same question on the specific date - was their any business value delivered by specifically launching the new app on New Year's? If not, this rewrite basically cost huge amounts of burnout across the mobile and server teams for no business value. At best it seems like an intense learning experience that didn't actually unlock $$.

coldcode 5y ago

My team and I were often the target for insane rewrite requests like this; I know this type of ridiculousness only too well. Sure you can succeed even under the most insane circumstances but that cost is not worth it for the people who are forced to do the impossible; in the end the people who suffered are mostly ignored while the top execs revel in the end result as if it was them personally doing it. I finally said enough of this madness and retired this year. No matter how many times you manage to pull off miracles the people demanding them don't give a shit about you or your team.

sciprojguy 5y ago
This. If you're willing to routinely go "above and beyond" your normal work hours, then in management's mind that "above and beyond" will become your normal work hours and it will factor into their planning.

tester756 5y ago

>The pace of work is still excruciatingly slow. Tooling is a major issue: compiling the app from scratch takes 25-30 minutes on iOS and around 10 on Android. what the fuck? HaLf HoUr To CoMpIlE aPp?

sneak 5y ago

> I have no idea how, but two and a half-hours later, the fix is live. I'm assuming the release team used all the goodwill accumulated over the years to make the fastest app update I've ever heard of happen. Either way, it's done, and done fast. Let's just hope it works. It's sort of amazing how we as an industry have all just adapted to the App Store industrywide censorship and gatekeeping. It's astounding that Apple has been able to pull this off, and even more astounding that so many companies are willing to work as sharecroppers for them. Find it on the Apple App Store under AOL keyword Uber!

yboris 5y ago

I'm curious, what would have been the repercussions of an engineer saying "I'm comfortable with at most 40 hours of work per week". Would they have been fired? Also, were the people working longer hours getting paid overtime?

phtrivier 5y ago

I love the author's writing in general, and it obvious that he learned the lesson from this experience. What's insane is that their management has not learned that lesson, from, say, the last 30years of people writing about software project management. I guess it will take such a caricatural death march to kill a unicorn before people get a clue. (And even that would be surprising. Not the killing - the getting a clue. ) Still, that's almost as great an advertisement for _not_ working at Uber as, say... everything else coming out of Uber.

didibus 5y ago

I kinda hate this engineer, he didn't push hard enough, he let the professional bar be crossed, there was seemingly no business value in the whole project either. It would be refreshing if the devs just didn't take this, those that quit after should have quit during the project instead. I think there's a saying that goes: "you get what you're willing to tolerate". This is often the reason why employees get screwed over, they're willing to tolerate far too much, for far too little reasons. Covering up bad management and planning is not something engineers should tolerate. You should say, no sorry, you missed the deadline to fund us and have engineering start early enough, that's that, you screwed up your planning, you failed at being a good manager. We're not going to cover for your screw up. Edit: Specifically, I don't personally hate them, but I hate that it played out this way, and I know it's a difficult position to be in and it's difficult to get out of, it just makes me mad, and I don't know what solutions there are.. maybe to fight to change the norm back to hourly employment, or have contracts with a per-week maximum hour cap that if breached warrants bonus pay on top of salaried employment.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
Not everyone wants to martyr themself to save management from hoisting themselves on their own petards. Especially when it's just a taxi app.
qwertywert_ 5y ago
Well they are getting paid like 500k no?
- animal531 5y ago
  No, that's how you get exploited. You get paid 100% of your salary for 100% of your agreed upon time. If you're then expected to work 200% of the time then you should be paid 200%, with the ability to say no if you don't want to. The actual amount is irrelevant.
  - seem_2211 5y ago
    This is a deluded way of thinking the world works. Is it how things should be? Probably. But this is nothing close to reality.

jeffrallen 5y ago

Shit like this is why Uber should have failed. Total disregard for humans. TK is a monster.

subsaharancoder 5y ago

"The art of the rewrite" by Uber Leadership could be an interesting book. In 2019 When AB5 was passed another rewrite was done in order to make the case that drivers were not employees but independent contractors and teams were assembled into one "zone" working like crazy to make some major changes for one market (the fear was that AB5 would be the start and all other states would follow with similar laws). The funny thing is during multiple meetings people would ask if Lyft was doing anything as radical as Uber and AFAIK the answer was no. FFWD to 2021 and with the passage of Prop 22 most if not all of the features implemented as part of the rewrite including DSTOP (Drivers Set Their Own Price), Price range instead of Fixed price etc are being stripped out.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> And as per Apple's restrictions, if your bundle size is over 100MB, users cannot download the app over the air I wish stores implemented more such hard limits, or other strong incentives to reduce space usage. I bet Uber could make its app significantly smaller than 234 MB (Google Maps: 137 MB, Chrome: 36 MB), but that would require effort, and it's cheaper to consume an extra 100 MB on 100 million other people's phones than to put in that effort.

bhupy 5y ago
Just curious…why? For the vast majority of Uber’s users, space is basically free.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Because I can store either Uber's (and 10 other companies') bloat, or an extra 10 album's worth of music. I'd rather have the music.
  - bhupy 5y ago
    Well, in practice, it's not either-or, the vast majority of users get to have both 10+ companies "bloat", as well as 10 album's worth of music. The base model of an Apple iPhone comes with 64GB, which is probably more than enough for the vast majority of Apple users — all the bloaty apps one might use on a day to day basis, all their pictures, and all their music. For an extra $50 you get 128GB. This is more than enough for the vast vast majority of Apple users (yes I'm aware that there probably exists dozens of idiosyncratic power users who might need even more). In fact, if you're the kind of user that's going to blow past that, it's probably because you're storing more-than-average 4K or 8K video and RAW images, where shaving down app size is probably not going to help anyway.
dbbk 5y ago
If you'd read the article you would learn the many reasons why the app blew past the bundle size limit. None of which particularly being their fault.

hypebeast123 5y ago

>Ariana Huffington joins Uber's board around the same time and releases her book on the importance of sleep right around this time, and piles of free copies are available in the office So basically, work 80 hours a week and have Ariana Huffington shill her useless book to you? Uber sounds like a shithole if you ask me. Those people that quit made the right choice